Who’s The Asshole Who Destroyed Nashville’s Community Garden?

The Greenhouse Of Death

The Tennessee Dept. of Transportation, aka the “Department of Concrete,” is living up to its nickname by punching local hippies kicking the African American community bulldozing Nashville’s best known community garden:

B.J. Doughty, TDOT spokeswoman, said the group, called EarthMatters Tennessee and led by Sizwe Herring, had basically allowed the site to deteriorate, moving from its originally stated “green” goal of sustainable crop production and composting to a hodge-podge of uses.

“I don’t know of a single vegetable growing there,” Doughty said. “There were a couple of abandoned vehicles on the site.”

What the hell? Have you looked at the calendar, lady? Global warming notwithstanding, Nashville’s last frost date is April 5 -- three days ago. There ain’t gonna be any vegetables growing there for a while. Are you a total moron, or just pretending to be one?

And I’m calling major bullshit on that “allowed the site to deteriorate” stuff. This is my neighborhood. I drive past here every day; I jog past here, I walk my dogs by here. It has not deteriorated. It’s a working garden. I’m sorry it doesn’t look enough like Cheekwood for you. This isn’t for the perfumed set to ooh and aaah over as they drink their sweet tea. This is for people to grow food. It’s an all-volunteer operation and yes, there are people working out here most Saturdays! In season, this is a vibrant community garden with, yes, vegetables and a rose garden honoring Deford Bailey.

Smelling a tremendous waft of bullshit over this story, I headed down to the site this afternoon and witnessed the carnage for myself. There I met and spoke with Sizwe Herring, heard an EarthMatters board member wonder how she could possibly raise the $10,000 TDOT threatened to charge for its “cleanup,” and listened as an elderly African American lady with her hair in curlers laid into the TDOT crew about how humanity was destroying God’s creation and nobody seemed to care. It just about broke my heart to see this rag-tag group of people who had been called to the site on a workday while TDOT supervisors in their starched white shirts put the riff raff in their place.

Near as I could gather, the EarthMatters folks had been given a month to clean up the site, but then for some reason TDOT bulldozers arrived early. I honestly don’t know what happened on that end. What I did hear is that two -- two -- residents across the street from the garden complained about noise and called the garden an eyesore.


Two.

One of the TDOT supervisors told me the garden was not the problem, the greenhouse was. It was filthy. Oh my. A dirty greenhouse, can you imagine? /sarcasm. You can see the picture of it above.

If you’ve been to the site, you know that the greenhouse sits far back from the street, behind a chain-link fence covered with honeysuckle. I can’t imagine how that could possibly be an eyesore to any residents. You have to be inside the garden to even see it!

Someone else said the problem was the composting operation, which according to BJ Doughty in the article above was part of the original deal the state made with EarthMatters. So if the state decided it no longer wanted composting, they surely didn't have to bring bulldozers out to stop it.

The other complaint from these two neighbors was noise, which is the most hilarious complaint of all. Apparently the gardeners had drumming and flutes and other live music on work days -- something I never saw, but of course I’m not out there every weekend. Regardless, the irony of someone complaining about noise when they live in the shade of the Interstate is pretty rich. Plus, Sevier Park backs up to those houses and the city actually hosts live music concerts there every summer. So, I'm calling bullshit on that complaint too.

The TDOT folks were doing a lot of talking and we heard one thing from one person and another thing from someone else. One guy told me the gardens would not be destroyed, but for some reason the hand-painted pavillions were demolished when I got there. I just don't know why a pavillion is a problem. I'm totally not getting it.

I don’t know these folks who complained. Maybe they are extraordinarily sensitive -- in which case, why move next to I-440? I just smell something else going on here, something along the lines of people not liking the poor blacks and dirty fucking hippies working together to plant a garden. That just really chaps some folks in the wrong place. I'm sorry but this just smacks of racism to me. If I'm wrong, well, bygones.

Anyway, I called Sen. Henry's office and his assistant offered to send me photos of the garden before TDOT "cleaned it up" -- which I said was unnecessary since I live near there and see it every day. She then said that there's nothing the Senator could do, the state Senate does not tell the departments how to run their business.

She actually said that. Which makes me think the state legislature is basically useless. I mean, it's good to know if TDOT accidentally bulldozes your house while pushing through a highway that your state Senator can't do a damn thing about it. But I digress.

And she then passed the buck to TDOT's Winston Gaffron at (615) 350-4300. So whatever. You know what to do.

ADDING.... The more I think about it, the more this stinks. TDOT folks have been acting so defensive about this whole thing ... from BJ Doughty saying she never saw a vegetable growing there to the starched-shirt crew on site this afternoon telling me the greenhouse was an eyesore.

Someone better dig into this.

Without further ado:

Raised Beds. With Stuff Growing In Them

Pavillion Destroyed By TDOT

I Know Let's Put A Racetrack Here

Here’s a garden tour from two years ago:

Your Country Is Addicted To Cheap Labor

There is so much wrong with this scenario I don’t even know where to start.

How about starting with the human rights violations:

SMYRNA — A Mexican guest worker says a landscaping company with Tennessee state contracts and a federal stimulus loan guarantee held him and fellow workers like indentured servants, confiscating their passports and subjecting them to constant surveillance by managers who were often armed.

Hilario Razura Jimenez said in an interview that he was rescued from Vanderbilt Landscaping’s company housing Wednesday night by staff from the Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity. He waited until everyone else was asleep before sneaking out at about midnight, he said. Staff with the New Orleans-based nonprofit were in touch with him by text message and drove out to pick him up.

Alliance executive director Saket Soni said company officials last week put another worker on a bus back to Mexico when they learned that he had been talking with their group.

A person who answered the phone at the company on Thursday said he would not comment on the allegations and refused to give his name. The company, which has $2.4 million in state Transportation Department contracts and a $900,000 a stimulus loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has offices in Smyrna and Mason.

Jimenez said he has come to the U.S. on an H2B guestworker visa twice before. Both times the pay and conditions were exploitative, but he came again because he was desperate.

Oh my God. It's the John Pickle Company all over again! We never learn, do we?

Hey America, wake up. You want to know where your jobs went? They went into the pockets of the Greed Machine, “small businesses” that would rather exploit cheap labor provided by desperate people from foreign countries than pay you a living wage you can use to send your kids to college.

This is what’s wrong with America, people. This is what happens when you “privatize” public jobs. This is exactly what will happen when all of those Metro school custodians are fired and Metro contracts out its landscaping and custodial services. Who will get those jobs? Not hard working Americans, but hard working foreigners, who because they are desperate will work for peanuts and live in substandard, slave-house conditions.

The State of Tennesseee is using taxpayer money to pay foreign workers, when there are plenty of people in this state who need the work. And don't you know as soon as someone suggests that the state not hire companies who use foreign labor we'll hear all of that screeching and squawking about the "free hand of the market." You know what? The free hand of the market can bite me. Hell, it's biting you.

Oh, and I'm calling bullshit on this:

A Nashville Union leader also brought up the issue of taking jobs from American workers. The Vanderbilts said they ran ads in newspapers in Nashville and Memphis for three weeks. They said they did 70 interviews, and said most of the applicants decided the work was too hard.

I'm not buying that. That just reeks of Rush Limbaugh "the unemployed are lazy" white privilege elitism. Try paying people what they are worth, then you'll get some takers. This is life in a "right to work" state: right to work? Bullshit. Right to see your job go to desperate "guest" workers, more like.

A bunch of greedy, selfish bastards have sold the notion that legally exploiting desperate Mexicans is somehow better than paying Americans a decent wage to do the same job. I know it really sucks that companies like Vanderbilt Landscaping can't legally exploit American workers, gosh I have a sad for you. Poor, pitiful "small business" that you are, I know we're all supposed to worship at the altar of the "small businessman" these days, you're American heroes you really are. Except when you're not, like when you exploit foreigners to boost your profits, just because you can. Hey, fuck you.

How many times do I have to say it? We are cheap labor addicts. When will Democrats wake up and say, enough already? Time to support American workers?

This is why I have been opposed to “guest worker” programs every time they are proposed, be it from George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Guest worker programs are simply institutionalized cheap labor. We refuse to pay what things are worth so we’ll just create a permanent underclass to toil in the sun for us, meanwhile millions of Americans need work but we’ll just say they’re lazy and be done with it.

Pay no attention to the giant elephant in the room. The problem is not “undocumented workers” or “illegal immigration” or “organized labor.” The problem, as always, is greed. Slave labor in the interest of corporate profits is not just fine and dandy.

This pisses me off more than you can begin to believe. We need a national living wage law. Now. Pay people what they are worth.

(h/t, Joe Powell at KnoxViews)

Creating A Bike Friendly City

Copenhagen figured out how to do it. Watch, from Current TV:



Copenhagen is renowned for being a bike-friendly city. This is a new thing; when I lived in Copenhagen back in the 1980s, bicycles were rarely used for commuting. People might ride their bikes to the train station, but you didn't see bicycles in the city center like you do now and you most certainly would not have biked from the suburbs into the city. It just wasn't done. Copenhagen created this bike culture in the past 25 years. It did so by creating a bicycle infrastructure: dedicated bike lanes and bike bridges, timed traffic lights, etc.

Here in Nashville traffic is one of our most serious issues. The interstates are jammed at rush hour and inside the city our neighborhoods are darned near impossible to navigate. Just try getting through Green Hills at lunchtime, I dare you. The solution our brilliant nincompoops at TDOT have come up with? Widening roads, adding a center turn lane on Hillsboro Pike, and making it completely impossible for a bike lane ever to be added to what is a major thoroughfare. Thanks a lot, idiots.

I own a bicycle but it gets precious little use, despite the fact that we live easy biking distance to grocery stores and other services. The reason is that you are literally putting your life in your hands to ride a bike in this city. I've been run off the road more than once, and I know people who have been seriously injured by careless drivers. Two months ago driving down Blakemore I saw an SUV crush a bicycle on purpose, then speed away as the rider (who had been knocked down but was OK) was left screaming blooding murder at the top of his lungs.

It's a damn shame that we have this backwards attitude because honestly, you cannot pave enough roadway to hold all the cars. That's like bailing the Queen Mary with a thimble. The only solution is to reduce the number of cars on the road. One way to do that is to encourage pedestrian and bike traffic, and the only way that will work is by making it safer for people to get around town in ways that don't involve a car.

TDOT: The Dept. Of Concrete Is Baaack!

I’m going to step away from my regularly scheduled programming for a moment to get all hyper-local and voice my disdain for the TN Dept. of Transportation’s Hillsboro Pike “fix.” I say “fix” because this project seems designed solely to fix TDOT’s reputation and make a lot of noises about being responsive to business owners in Green Hills, while pissing off the people who actually live here: namely, people like me.

Yes, Hillsboro Pike, which happens to be a state highway, is a major clusterfuck, but I don’t see how adding a center turn lane south of Woodmont is going to solve anything. For one thing, there already exists a center turn lane--and traffic lights!--through the most congested part, which is from the Starbucks strip mall, past the Green Hills Mall, all the way down to the Hill Center. In short, the busy retail areas and Hillsboro High School, which is the destination of most of this traffic.

I live in this neighborhood and I have to say, rare is the time I’m stuck behind some clueless left-turner. The problem is simply too much traffic for too little road. Exacerbating this problem is commercial vehicle traffic like delivery trucks traveling in peak hours, and hundreds of Hillsboro High School students who all leave campus at the same time. Adding center turn lanes won’t do diddly to solve those problems because for one thing, as I already mentioned, we already have center turn lanes!

The most problematic clusterfuck is the double-light intersection on Hillsboro at Glen Echo and Crestmoor which, let me repeat, has a left turn lane but it’s too short to be useful, the lights aren’t timed properly, and the whole thing is a giant mess.

Meanwhile, the proposed “fix” could have a devastating impact on the surrounding residential neighborhoods, since it won’t actually solve the problem but could make it easier for frustrated drivers to turn onto residential streets in an effort to avoid the ever worsening clusterfuck. As if we don’t have a bad enough cut-through problem as it is.

I’m not being a NIMBY here, I’m just saying, I live in this neighborhood and I know what the problems are and what it’s going to take to fix it. TDOT would know it too if they had bothered to ask us, but they didn’t. There wasn’t one neighborhood meeting about it, though there were plenty of meetings for the business community which just figures, doesn’t it? Kinda puts the whole charade into perspective.

I called TDOT and asked how they come up with this cockamamie idea to begin with and was told the name of some consultant (of course) who had worked really hard to come up with a totally awesome plan, though again, they never bothered to speak to all of the constituents in the area, just the business ones. So in other words, the state paid someone a few hundred grand to pull something out of their ass, which they did while chuckling about what a bunch of suckers the folks at TDOT are.

Of course, I suspect TDOT and Metro aren’t interested in fixing any real problems. That would require either 1) widening the road (a hugely expensive and unfeasable solution) and 2) restricting the amount of traffic, by such means as building bike lanes and sidewalks, restricting commercial traffic to certain times of the day, and getting the high school to stagger its schedule so hundreds of kids aren’t all descending on Hillsboro Pike at the same time.

TDOT has already said bike lanes and sidewalks are not gonna happen, which is really too bad since as the new owner of an old bicycle, I’d love to bike to the grocery store but I value my life too much and those soccer moms in their Chevy Subdivisions can’t drive for shit. Seriously people, you know I’m right.

This plan appears to be a bunch of smoke and mirrors to appease the ever-growing chorus of developers, business owners and, yes, residents wondering why the city and state haven't done anything about the traffic mess that is Green Hills. And yes, they are right, it is a mess, it's a horrible mess, and anyone who lives in the neighborhood knows to use the back roads and avoid Hillsboro Pike at all costs because if you don't, good lord you'll regret it. That fact alone has got to strike fear in the hearts of those whose livelihood depends on bringing people into town, not turning them away.

I get that but let me repeat: TDOT's brilliant plan will not solve the problem. All it will do is give the appearance of solving the problem. And maybe that is the point.

The person I spoke to at TDOT said there were “traffic studies” and “accident reports” that verified the need for this center lane (which, did I mention, already exists where the worst of the traffic is!). But when I asked to see a copy she grew vague, said it wasn’t online, didn’t know where there was a copy, in fact, even she hadn’t seen a copy, yada yada.

I’m pretty good at smelling bullshit and I think I was just handed a pile of it.

In the past TDOT has been criticized for basically paving over every perceived problem and guess what, that’s what they seem to be doing here. They’re treating Green Hills like it’s I-40 and it’s not, it’s a mixed neighborhood of residential, retail, and institutional uses. At least one of those constituents was forgotten in this equation.

So TDOT and everyone involved in this waste of taxpayer money, including Mayor Karl Dean, you get a middle finger from Southern Beale today.

Now, back to my regularly scheduled rants against Republicans.